Links, Page 27

"Nix the tics," by Sadie F. Dingfelder

I don’t consider myself to be a particularly impressionable person. I’m afraid I’d be a very poor prospect for cult recruiters. When I change longstanding opinions, it is usually only after the utmost consideration and deliberation. However, there have been rare instances when after having read something it constituted an epiphany for me and subsequently caused me to abruptly undertake the proverbial “one-eighty.”

One such instance was after finishing Herman Wouk’s epic masterpieces The Winds of War and War and Remembrance, the latter being the sequel to the former. Prior to reading Mr. Wouk’s works, my opinion of President Franklin D. Roosevelt had been that he had been a charismatic but rather muddled idealist whose paternalistic, quasi-socialistic inclinations unwittingly planted the seeds of societal decadence.

However, upon finishing Mr. Wouk’s novels and researching FDR’s life and career more thoroughly, I have come to view him as a visionary, albeit of a pragmatic and calculating nature. President Roosevelt had been Bismarck with charisma; realpolitik couched with charm.

FDR inherited from his presidential predecessor a nation afflicted with economic deprivation and threatening to spiral into chaos and possible revolution, and he bequeathed to his successor the very same nation as one of the mightiest powers the world has ever known. I have come to view the man as a political genius and easily our greatest president of the Twentieth Century.

Another such epiphany in my life was when I first became acquainted with the famous quotation by Sir John Harrington (1561-1612). The quotation reads: “Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason? Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason.” Other less poetic ways of saying the same would include: “Might makes right”; and “Treason is largely a question of dates.” Click to continue: